The influence of the social media on the effectiveness of commercial web sites has become an increasingly important subject. A major problem facing marketers and public relation professionals revolves around the prolific use of social media sites and their effect in directing traffic to other web sites, for example E-commerce sites and other corporate sites.
Available web analytics software tools, such as Google Analytics and many other such systems are designed to collect real-time site traffic information and can provide resulting statistics through graphical user interfaces (GUI) and in formatted reports to the operator of E-commerce or other sites instrumented with such web analytics tools.
A brief description of web analytics, provided for example by Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics), may be useful to give the reader an introduction to the subject matter:
“Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. Web analytics is not just a tool for measuring website traffic but can be used as a tool for business research and market research. Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print advertising campaigns. It helps one to estimate how the traffic to the website changed after the launch of a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provides data on the number of visitors, page views etc. to gauge the popularity of the sites which will help to do the market research. There are two categories of web analytics; off-site and on-site web analytics. Off-site web analytics refers to web measurement and analysis regardless of whether you own or maintain a website. It includes the measurement of a website's potential audience (opportunity), share of voice (visibility), and buzz (comments) that is happening on the Internet as a whole. On-site web analytics measure a visitor's journey once on your website. This includes its drivers and conversions; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase. On-site web analytics measures the performance of your website in a commercial context. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign's audience response. Historically, web analytics has referred to on-site visitor measurement. However in recent years this has blurred, mainly because vendors are producing tools that span both categories.”
A web analytics tool alone can be an important marketing research tool, but while it can provide detailed and summarized information and analysis of the traffic that arrives at a web site, including categorizing sources of the traffic, it cannot determine the reasons for the traffic arriving.
Accordingly, there is a need in the industry for the development of alternative and improved methods and systems, which would take into account individual drivers for Internet traffic on commercial web sites.